Multitrance Cannabis Silver Haze Black Tea, 20 Pyramid Bags

Three teas, three numbers, and only one is a cannabinoid

Look at the tea shelf and you will see figures that appear directly comparable. They are not, and the difference is worth two minutes.

The Multitrance CBD tea states 7.5mg of CBD in each bag. That is a cannabinoid figure: it tells you how much cannabidiol is in the thing you put in the cup.

The Astra Hemp tea states 25mg of hemp oil in each bag. That is a figure too, and it is honest about what it measures, but what it measures is a quantity of oil rather than a quantity of any cannabinoid. Hemp seed oil is pressed from the seed of the plant, and cannabinoids are not in the seed, they are in the resin on the flower. So 25mg of hemp oil can be entirely accurate and tell you nothing at all about cannabidiol.

This tea states nothing. Its ingredient list is black tea with hemp seed oil, with no quantity given for either.

Now put those side by side. Twenty-five is more than three times seven point five. If you scan a shelf quickly, the hemp oil tea looks like the strongest of the three and this one looks like it simply has not been measured. In cannabinoid terms the order is close to the reverse: one of them has a stated cannabidiol content and the other two do not.

None of that makes any of these products dishonest. A hemp oil tea is exactly what it says it is. The problem is that the numbers are printed in the same typeface, on the same shelf, in the same units, and nothing anywhere tells you they are counting different things.

What is in the bag

The ingredient list is two things: black tea, and hemp seed oil.

That is a shorter list than most tea products manage, and it is worth taking at face value. The tea is the drink. The hemp seed oil is what makes it a cannabis-branded tea rather than an ordinary one, and hemp seed oil is a food ingredient, used across the food industry, pressed from the seed rather than extracted from the flower.

This is the fifth product in this part of our range where the plant element turns out to be seed-derived rather than a cannabinoid extract, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth remembering when shopping the category generally.

The bags themselves are pyramid bags rather than flat ones, which is not marketing. A pyramid gives the leaf room to move and unfurl in the water, and a black tea with whole or broken leaf extracts noticeably better with that room than it does compressed flat. If you have ever wondered why the same tea tastes thinner from a supermarket flat bag, that is much of the answer.

Twenty bags to a box. The variety name is Silver Haze, and the maker does a White Widow as well, both of which are cannabis strain names rather than tea varietals. They tell you nothing about where the tea leaf came from or what it will taste of, and there is more on that below.

Choosing a cannabis tea is choosing a caffeine level

Here is a decision hiding in plain sight that no retailer frames properly.

Multitrance makes its cannabis and CBD teas on four different bases, and they are not equivalent. Black tea carries the most caffeine of the four. Green tea carries less. Rooibos has none at all, and the maker says so plainly on its own listings. Chamomile likewise has none.

So when you pick a cannabis-branded tea you are also picking, quite consequentially, whether you are drinking something caffeinated. This one is a black tea, which means it is the most caffeinated option in the range. If you were planning to drink it in the evening, that is the thing to know, and it has nothing to do with the hemp at all.

How much caffeine you actually get is also the one variable on this whole page that you control, because it depends on brewing. A short steep pulls less; a long one pulls more, along with more tannin and more bitterness. Three to five minutes is the conventional range for a black tea, and the longer end of that gives you a stronger, more astringent cup in every sense.

We are not going to give you a milligram figure for the caffeine, because none is published and a tea bag's yield genuinely varies with water temperature, steep time and how hard you squeeze the bag. What we can tell you is which end of the range each base sits at, which is more useful than a number would be.

Why a black tea is called Silver Haze

Silver Haze is a cannabis strain. It is not a tea varietal, a region, or a grade of leaf, and there is no Silver Haze plantation.

What the name is doing is signalling the category. In a range where every product is cannabis-branded, strain names are the natural vocabulary, and they carry an association of a particular aroma even when what is in the box is black tea and seed oil. The maker also makes a White Widow tea and a green tea version, and the same applies to those.

In practical terms the name tells you nothing about how the tea will taste. What will determine that is the black tea base, which is what you are mostly drinking, plus a faint nutty note from the seed oil. Anyone expecting the tea to taste like the strain it is named after will be disappointed, and it is better to know that before you brew it than after.

That is not a criticism of the product. A pleasant black tea with a nutty edge is a perfectly good thing to be. It is simply that the naming points somewhere the contents do not follow.

If you want a tea with a cannabinoid figure

Straightforwardly: this is not one, and we stock several that are.

The Multitrance CBD pyramid tea bags state 150mg across a box, which works out at 7.5mg a bag. MediCBD's pyramid tea states 150mg a box on the same basis. Hempthy's infused tea bags state 160mg. All three put a cannabidiol figure on the front because the figure is the reason to buy them.

If you want the black tea base specifically with a stated figure, the CBD ranges include black pyramid versions, so you do not have to trade the tea you like for the number you want.

And if caffeine is the thing you are trying to avoid, the rooibos and chamomile options in the CBD range are the ones described by the maker as caffeine free, which no cannabis-branded black tea is ever going to be.

One practical note before you order anything here: this particular tea is currently out of stock, so if it was the Silver Haze specifically that you wanted, it is worth checking back rather than substituting blindly.

Who should not buy this

If you want CBD, this tea does not state a cannabinoid figure and its plant element is seed oil. The CBD teas in the table above are the right shelf.

If you are avoiding caffeine, do not buy a black tea. It is the most caffeinated base in the range, and the cannabis branding does nothing to change that. The rooibos and chamomile versions exist precisely for this.

If you are expecting the tea to taste of Silver Haze, it will not. It is black tea with a faint nutty note from seed oil, and the strain name is a category signal rather than a flavour description.

If you drink tea with milk and are used to a robust builder's brew, a pyramid bag of this kind is a lighter, more aromatic style and may read as weak with milk in it. Brew it longer or drink it without.

And it is out of stock at the moment, which is the most practical objection of all.

18+ only, as with everything we sell.